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Too Soon for Definitive Standards?


W3C, others say there is work to be done on technologies that underlie mashups

By Jeff Feinman
April 15, 2007 — 
The world of mashups can be a chaotic one, with little structure and order when it comes to the methods that developers use to merge data from various sources. Though the nature of the beast seems to preclude the development of standards expressly for mashups, various technologies that can be integral pieces of mashup creation are being enhanced, and standardized when appropriate.

When asked if the World Wide Web Consortium is currently considering any particular standards for the creation of mashups, Lee Feigenbaum, chair of the W3C’s data access working group, said that it is more accurate to think of the organization’s efforts as a “continuum of technologies.” The vast majority of mashups, he said, are based off of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, so those core technologies play a large part in their creation.

“The W3C doesn’t have a mashup activity or working group,” Feigenbaum said. “Instead, it has a variety of groups whose technologies could be used in certain cases for producing mashups. If you’re only dealing with XML data, XQuery might be the best way to unify that data. SPARQL [SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language] might be good for data from disparate sources. As far as the meat of the W3C mashup picture, I think it’s better to look at it as technologies all contributing to faster, more agile developments of mashups.”

STRUGGLING OVER STANDARDS
Dan Gisolfi, IBM’s executive IT architect for emerging Internet technologies, said he thinks that at this point in time, mashup technologies are too new for the creation of standards. “It’s similar to any other emerging technology, where you’re going to follow a curve,” Gisolfi said. “Up front, there’s a lot of innovation. And then the amount of innovation becomes confusing, so we’ll need some consolidation. Right now, I’m suggesting the need for consolidation isn’t necessarily there yet because there’s still a lot of innovation going on.”

Nonetheless, IBM has been pushing its Web 2.0-based mashup maker, QEDWiki, and Gisolfi appeared to be very high on its potential. QEDwiki is wiki-based, and can run in a Web browser without the need for special plug-ins. Mashup creators can create a wiki page and select from different widgets. Users can then mash rich content from different sources and work with the specific information they need. They then have the ability to send links to other people so that mashups can be shared.

“The reason I believe in this technology so strongly is that it’s probably the easiest technology I’ve ever had to deal with while facing a customer,” he said. “Once you show the customer what you’re doing, light bulbs go on; they get it. [With QEDWiki], we’re going to go out there and demonstrate how mashup creation should be done.”

Some smaller companies that have delved into mashup creation also said there are no definitive standards on the horizon. Officials of TopQuadrant, a company that offers Semantic Web solutions, said that they are not pushing for any particular format for the creation of mashups.

“Mashups are, by definition, a merger of information from multiple sources,” said Barbara Reichert, a spokeswoman for TopQuadrant. “As such, nobody is in a position to say, ‘Here is the best format for mashups.’ You have to be willing to make do with whatever you find. So there can be no sensible recommendation for formats.”

Jeremy Suriel, CTO and chief architect of Goowy Media, a San Diego-based company that specializes in Web desktops and Webtop mini-applications, said he prefers widgets that are RSS-based when integrating, or mashing up, with external services. The company’s widget provider, yourminis.com, benefits from using an RSS/Atom-based API because most of the “plumbing code,” such as parsing and data extraction, can be reused. One disadvantage is that those APIs usually do not offer the same level of information and querying capabilities that would exist in a proprietary API.

“I find that when people adopt and correctly adhere to data standards, consuming data becomes less complex and makes for better integration,” Suriel said when asked about possible mashup standards. “I would love to see more use of Dublin Core extensions [for metadata representation in HTML and XHTML documents] within RSS feeds, common date formats, and more standardization and use of microformats within XHTML pages.” He also said that security is one of the biggest concerns to developers using mashups, as the access of multiple services requires a certain level of trust by the user.

KEY ELEMENTS
Though neither GRDDL (Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages), a mechanism for extracting RDF (Resource Description Framework) data from XML and XHTML documents, nor SPARQL is chartered specifically as a mashup standard, they both can play an integral part in the creation of mashups. Many mashups today are based on screen-scraping, extracting text data from a Web page, but GRDDL offers an RDF representation based on transformation algorithms, which are typically represented in XSLT.

When a mashup creator uses SPARQL queries, he or she is essentially defining his or her own API, according to Feigenbaum. It might be too impractical for a mashup creator to grab entire documents from multiple Web sites, so SPARQL queries can seek out the necessary data interface. SPARQL query data does not need to be natively represented in RDF because GRDDL can tweak SPARQL results to allow RDF display.

SPARQL was submitted as a candidate recommendation last summer to the W3C, which placed it two steps away from final recommendation, but a few months later it dropped down to working draft status due to what Feigenbaum called a “few bugs.” However, Feigenbaum said he and his team will publish the last full draft of the specification by the end of April, so SPARQL may be only a few months away from becoming a full-fledged recommendation.

RDF is a graphical data structure that many sources have labeled an ideal element to the creation of mashups. Many say that RDF’s simple data model and ability to model disparate concepts are why it is a strong source for mashups.

“RDF is a flexible data model to integrate data from different native representations,” Feigenbaum said. “XML is a tree structure, and if you’re integrating stuff, you’re also going to need to have a structural integration and find places to put the different sources of data. If you’re integrating with an RDF graph, you still need to have this idea of shared vocabulary at some point because you won’t be able to integrate, but you don’t need to worry about structure. The data merges a little more seamlessly.”


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